Susan Sontag Quotes

Often something looks, or is felt to look, "better" in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. (Hence, one is always disappointed by a photograph that is not flattering.)

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

Rules of taste enforce structures of power.

I have loved people passionately whom I wouldn't have slept with for anything, but I think that's something else. That's friendship -- love, which can be a tremendously passionate emotion, and it can be tender and involve a desire to hug or whatever. But it certainly doesn't mean you want to take off your clothes with that person. But certain friendships can be erotic. Oh, I think friendship is very erotic, but it isn't necessarily sexual. I think all my relationships are erotic: I can't imagine being fond of somebody I don't want to touch or hug, so therefore there's always an erotic aspect to some extent.

It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

To set their sufferings alongside the sufferings of another people was to compare them (which hell was worse?), demoting Sarajevo's martyrdom to a mere instance.

I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or even name it properly (or consistently) to oneself — these can be, it is felt they ought to be, masked by friendliness, or the most scrupulous manipulation.

But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. They look like everybody else.

Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their mind.

If literature has engaged me as a project, first as a reader, then as a writer, it is as an extension of my sympathies to other selves, other domains, other dreams, other territories.

Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.

For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural death is the obscene mystery the ultimate affront the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.

Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to "care" more.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

The best criticism, and it is uncommon, is of this sort that dissolves considerations of content into those of form.

Alone, alone. I am alone – I ache … Yet for the first time, despite all the anguish and the reality problems, I’m here. I feel tranquil, whole, ADULT.

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.

Depression is melancholy minus its charms.

I have always been full of lust - as I am now - but I have always been placing conceptual obstacles in my own path.

Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay

I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.